James Burnham’s Book Inspired NSC-68

In April 1950, a few months after Mao Zedong’s new communist government in China signed the Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance with the Soviet Union, the Truman administration’s national security team issued NSC-68, the classified blueprint for America’s Cold War policies. NSC-68 was declassified in February 1975. The principal author of NSC-68 was Paul Nitze, who had recently taken over from George Kennan the directorship of the State Department’s Policy Planning staff. Kennan, whose Long Telegram and “X” article in Foreign Affairs had urged the United States to adopt a policy of “firm and vigilant” containment toward the Soviet Union, was having second thoughts about his proposed policy, believing that Truman was emphasizing the military over the political aspects of containment. 

Nitze, a friend and colleague of Kennan’s, thought containment required stronger military support, and that was reflected in NSC-68. Nitze also believed that U.S. policy should look to exploit Soviet vulnerabilities by using political and economic warfare against their empire--especially in Eastern Europe. NSC-68 was based on the stated premise that the Soviet Union was “animated by a new fanatic faith, anti-thetical to our own, and seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world.” To achieve their goal, the Soviets first sought “the domination of the Eurasian land mass.”

The men in the Kremlin, according to NSC-68, were growing in confidence due to their atomic capabilities and their “success in the Far East” (i.e., China). There was a danger that these developments would cause the United States to “shift to the defensive, or to follow a dangerous policy of bluff.” And a defensive policy would likely lead “to a gradual withdrawal under the direct or indirect pressure of the Soviet Union, until one day we discover that we have sacrificed positions of vital interest.” This would result in our withdrawal from Europe and Asia, our retreat to the Western Hemisphere, and the formation of an ever increasing threat to our security posed by “a Soviet Empire comprising all or most of Eurasia.”

NSC-68 recommended not containment, but taking “dynamic steps to reduce the power and influence of the Kremlin inside the Soviet Union and other areas under its control” with the objective of “the establishment of friendly regimes not under Kremlin domination.” In other words, rollback or “liberation.” This was to be accomplished not by war, but rather by political, economic and subversive warfare “with a view to fomenting and supporting unrest and revolt in selected satellite countries.”

'The Coming Defeat of Communism'

According to a March 1982 RAND study, which was prepared for the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment, the intellectual basis for NSC-68 was James Burnham’s book "The Coming Defeat of Communism," which was published around the same time that NSC-68 was presented to President Harry Truman. As the author of the study explained, Burnham’s book made “public the case for the adoption of a strategy of victory,” and the report quoted an historian who had served in the Truman administration’s Defense Department who wrote that “Burnham’s ‘book struck profoundly sympathetic chords in important segments of the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, and among military planners at the Pentagon.’” Historian George Nash wrote that Burnham “established significant government connections in the first cold war years,” including lecturing at the National War College, Naval War College, and Air War College. And Burnham’s biographer Daniel Kelly noted that policymakers in the State Department, the Pentagon, and the CIA paid close attention to "The Coming Defeat of Communism." 

Additional evidence that Burnham’s book inspired NSC-68 came from Charles Burton Marshall, who served in the Truman State Department, and who revealed in the National Review in 1984 that Paul Nitze himself said that Burnham’s book was “the main intellectual stimulus” for NSC-68. Giles Scott-Smith has written about the similarities between Burnham’s analysis of the Soviet threat and recommendations for achieving victory in the Cold War to the strategy laid out in NSC-68.  Burnham had worked for the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, and in the spring of 1944 wrote a paper that warned about the emerging U.S.-Soviet conflict. After the war, Burnham periodically served as a consultant to the Central Intelligence Agency.

Burnham’s general perspectives on the Soviet threat and his policy proposals in "The Coming Defeat of Communism" are remarkably similar to those in NSC-68. One chapter in the book discusses “The Vulnerability of the Communist Empire” while another advocates “The Turn to the Offensive.” 

Burnham wrote that the Soviet Union occupied the “heartland of Eurasia,” which he described as “the most favorable strategic position of the world.” From that base, the Soviets have exerted control over Eastern Europe and extended communist control to all of China, and their ultimate goal was to extend communism to the rest of the world. This is the same diagnosis of the threat as set forth in NSC-68. 

'Untraditional warfare' the key

Burnham’s proposed offensive strategy included “aggravat[ing] . . . the economic crisis within the Soviet Empire” and using “every economic and diplomatic device to encourage the breakup of the satellite system.” He advocated using “untraditional methods” of warfare -- "ideological, subversive, guerrilla” -- as a part of an overall strategy of “offensive political-subversive warfare.” Burnham advocated, like NSC-68 did, switching from containment to a policy of “liberation.”

President Truman at first rejected much of the policy recommendations of NSC-68 as too costly, but then two months later North Korean forces, supported and supplied by the Soviet Union and China, invaded South Korea in the first major military engagement of the Cold War. Truman now recognized the need for increased military spending and for combating the spread of communism in Asia, as well as Europe. The policy recommendations of NSC-68 now seemed appropriate. When American and UN forces crossed the 38th parallel, Truman at first favored liberating all of North Korea from the communist yoke. But when China massively entered the war in October-November 1950, Truman reverted to containment instead of liberation. 

Burnham would later lament that our failure to liberate all of Korea and later our defeat in Vietnam were caused by the “self-imposed strategic prison” of containment. It would not be until the 1980s under the Reagan administration that the political-subversive-economic warfare aspects of NSC-68 (refined in Reagan’s NSDD-75) and "The Coming Defeat of Communism" would help undermine the Soviet Empire.